How can there be so many people unemployed, and yet still be so many employers advertising job openings they can't fill? Veteran Marketplace reporter and editor Mitchell Hartman '85 recently posed this question to Professor of Economics Mark Kuperberg, who suggested imagining the labor market was a produce market instead.

"You don't see a lot of rotting tomatoes and rotting fish in produce markets, and yet you do see a lot of unemployed workers, especially now," Kuperberg said. "The question is why? Why is it that the labor market does not seem to work as well in terms of allocating workers to jobs?"

Economic models developed by his year's Nobel winners, Hartman concluded, help explain the factors that get in the way of a market that efficiently matches workers and jobs.